Collaboration Chronicles

This is a compilation of the videos I took last Tuesday. If you’d like to know how I made the beer, check it out!

I thought I would include the recipe for this beer as well. Here it is!

If you want to read about freelancing, self employment, or running your own business, here’s a post about my little personal niche. This is a catch-all for some general ideas that are always floating around in my ever-adapting pursuit of a living with maximum personal satisfaction. (Not maximum money, by the way.) It’s a sequel to this post, A triple strategy for staying afloat with self generated income.

I like challenges and personal rewards. There wasn’t much of that back when I was a young person working in depressed, cheap upstate NY. It led to hopping around in disposable jobs (but the variety actually became quite helpful later.) The list was pretty long- animal care, cabinet-maker’s assistant, graveyard groundskeeper, porn store clerk, kid’s summer camp counselor, co-op living/dumpster-diving salvager, flea market/antique mall dealer- none lasted more than a few months. Then I finished school, traded the flea market for selling stuff on the internet, and got to be artist at a TV animation studio for 2 years.

The long term prospects in that area were dubious so I quit to move to the San Francisco Bay Area in late ‘07. Good timing, because many of my former co-workers were hit with surprise cut-backs and lay-offs.

In that year I did creative freelancing for the first time and learned tons of new skills, mostly for hustling up work and handling finances. Half of my year’s income came from animation, and half from internet sales.

Bad things happened to the economy. In December I went from having a streak of the best animation work yet, to zero. I had an inquiry from a big movie studio recruiter, then 2 weeks later his replacement followed up with news of a hiring freeze.

In creative work the competition is fierce, and if hot work stops coming there’s a plague of locusts waiting. Take a look at this generic freelance job on an average job site: Winning bidder’s rate is $8 an hour. I don’t even bother wasting time looking at those sites. Some competitors for the same work I do – animators in India or wherever- are locked in their employer’s studios as 24-hour wage slaves, in the sense of the term coined by Karl Marx. (It’s annoying when people act like it came from suburban teenagers.) I think if foreign workers are available that cheap, they can have it- if there’s no floor, there’s no competing with them, no matter how hard you work.

I had to adapt again so I changed my home business model to an equal-paying replacement for animation pay. Meanwhile I’m benefiting from the time to polish up new skills, helped by some access to free learning.

When hard work doesn’t get you ahead, flexibility can. Some keys to flexibility:

Maximize resources – combine your means
Minimize liabilities – live within your means
Expand your skill set
Know your limits

——–

Maximizing resources:

1. I use the previously-posted triple strategy
2. I’m using spare time and free learning
3. Here’s a long post I made about a public service I’m lucky enough to have access to for health care. Healthy San Francisco

Minimizing liabilities:

When I moved across country in ‘07, I considered renting an expensive, crappy, gas-guzzling truck. Instead I bought a used van at the same price and moved with my own equipment, using the built-in bed too. When I got to the bay area I found that the urban neighborhoods were so dense that a big vehicle wasn’t needed to get around, and the extra parking costs were quite heavy. I sold that van at enough profit between the NY price and the bay area price to cover the cost of a 3000 mile trip. The idea of handling my internet sales on nothing but a bike was daunting (stocking up goods, and hauling crates of mail to the post office)- it’s worked out quite well. The cost of owning a big vehicle that demands to get used can greatly offset the benefit of expanding the range of my business.

Moving across country from the least expensive city to the most expensive demanded a big stash of savings. Around the time I was thinking of moving, I considered other options. In mid-’07 the house I was renting went up for sale at mid 5 figures. I let the agent ooze a no-money-down mortgage sales pitch at me, until I said no and dodged a bullet. The people who bought it spent as much as the house cost for a new roof and remodeling, and then couldn’t find tenants. My neighbor who owned 4 houses across the street gave a nibble too, then he had to dump all of those houses at a 6-figure loss.

Expanding skill set:

Freelancing in animation or working at a small studio means wearing many hats. Unfortunately, the wider my range the less I can specialize. I like variety but don’t expect to work for a big studio without specializing. (A lot of high-end job ads ask for someone who’s expert at 17 things- a colleague is always saying, “who are these people”? Other people say they don’t exist and those ads are often formalities hiding a nepotistic crony system.) Anyways, specializing vs. diversifying is a constant balance. I decided that I was losing certain jobs without the ability to do character animation in Flash. Here’s a small partly-done animation scene I’m still working on.

Knowing limits:

This covers all of the above: know how hard you can compete, vs. how flexible you can be. Combine and live within your means. Balance specialty vs. variety. Here’s another limit: When you’re employing a freelancer, you can get the work fast, good or cheap- but usually only 2 of those.

When you’re in charge of your own living, I think you can choose variety, making lots of money, or personal satisfaction- but usually only 2 of those.

I don’t make a lot of money, but I like having freedom to do a variety of work I want to do, and doing OK in one of the most expensive and competitive cities.

I’ve been playing around with Wordpress for about two years now.

I started off using it for typical blog posting, del.icio.us bookmark posting, and a host of other blog/social media type solutions.  I began looking into using it to deploy multiple users and blogs for a side-project I was working on with William Hodges call Resellr (private for now).  We checked out Wordpress MU.  It allows for multiple users and blogs to be installed either as subdomains i.e.,  rob.collaborationchronicles.com or as directories within the domain i.e., collaborationchronicles.com/rob .  This is a great tool as it allows the domain admin to control any aspect of the Wordpress install, such as themes, plugins, etc., all from within the Wordpress MU admin screen. This was a great solution for allowing multiple users to login and post items, photos, etc. More recently I’ve been using Wordpress to act as a stand alone website with all the functionality of a blog (time relevant post, heirarchy, tags, categories), but with the functionality of a website (newsletter, contact us, flickr photos).  We can use the power of Wordpress as a dynamic webapp that can pull content from a variety of social media sources.  With the extensibilty of Wordpress paired with the community of developers creating wonderful solutions Wordpress really is a great fit for websites. I’ll give you a case example of how I used Wordpress to create a fully function website on the cheap and in a hurry.

Claremont Food not Lawns is a local community organization that help to spread awareness about food sources and help people convert their lawns into wonderful gardens.  I met them at a Wednesday night Green Market in Claremont.  They said they needed help to get a website up and running, as the site that they currently had was unfinished.  They had one of the vital components to making a sucessful website: content.  I met with Mary Beth and Todd to determine their budget and what they needed done.  As a community organization they were going to need the following:

• Monthly Newsletter
• Email contact page
• An events page
• Photos
• A news page (this is where the newsletter content will come from)
• Various information pages (how to volunteer, articles, etc.)
• A Youtube video post
• A link roll, resources, friends, etc.
• A way track traffic
• A way to automate the monthly newsletter

I determined that Wordpress would be a great solution for their needs and began creating the framework for how the site would function.  I compiled a list of the plugins I would require to accomplish this task.

In term of functionality here are the plugins that I use to handle my needs.

Askimet – For comment spam, it comes installed with Wordpress, simply active the plugin and enter your API key from Wordpress.com

Google Ultimate Analytics – Google tracking for websites.  http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ultimate-google-analytics/
Tan Tan Noodle Toolkit – For handling remote Flickr set as  albums on the site.  http://tantannoodles.com/toolkit/photo-album/

Example: Claremont Food not Lawns Photos

Photos Claremont Food Not Lawns via kwout

Google XML sitemap plugin- To create XML sitemaps and auto submit to search engines: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

Example: Claremont Food not Lawns Sitemap
Contact Form- To handle emailing from a form on the site: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contact-form-7/

Example: Claremont Food not Lawns Contact Us

Google Calendar- To pull events from a shared Google Calendar: http://code.google.com/p/wpng-calendar/

Example: Claremont Food Not Lawns Events Calendar

Back in college (‘02?) I visited a friend of mine who had just finished bottling a batch of homebrewed beer he had cooked and fermented in the previous weeks. Not only was I shocked that one could make their own beer with minimal effort (he was an engineering student after all) but that you could do it in your own apartment…in the closet no less!

After asking him all of the questions I could think of at the time, I bought a homebrewing kit and a quick “get started” type book from http://austinhomebrew.com/. I made a Pale Ale first, which I bottled too early and most of the bottled exploded during hte conditioning phase (when it’s carbonating itself in bottles).

In the next years, I made quite a few batches, but I never got that feeling of “holy shit, I can’t believe this!” like I did when I saw all of the non-labeled bottles on Eric’s kitchen table.

Last Friday, I made cheese for the first time. Figuring out that I could do this happened after asking for books about appreciating cheese, and being recommended a book about making cheese in your kitchen. Again, I did some quick research, and found out that cheese is as easy as adding two things other than milk, straining, and potentially coating and aging. The two things are acid and rennet.

Acid curdles milk slowly. Rennet is found in infant cow stomach and contains Protease, which coagulates milk. Adding rennet makes curds and whey (like the nursery rhyme). There is vegatable rennet, which is what I used, to help ease people’s minds about murdering baby cows.

I made 2 lbs. of mozzarella in less than 2 hours. It was one of the best tasting things I’ve ever made in the kitchen in such a short time. None of the beer I ever made tasted as good.

Since then, I’ve been thinking about opening a store to sell cheese, beer, vinegar, miso, and other baceteria made processed awesomeness online…which would lead to having a shop or tutorial store to teach these skills to the public. I’ve also wanted to video tape making cheese with friends from Collab21 or elsewhere, to see what their experience was with it.

So, look for some advances on the yeast and bacteria front in the coming months.